Martirosian, ODavel, M2009-02-182009-02-182008-11Martirosian, O and Davel, M. 2008. Acoustic analysis of diphthongs in Standard South African English. Nineteenth Annual Symposium of the Pattern Recognition Association of South Africa (PRASA 2008), Cape Town, South Africa, 27-28 November, pp 153-1579780799223507http://hdl.handle.net/10204/3021Nineteenth Annual Symposium of the Pattern Recognition Association of South Africa (PRASA 2008), Cape Town, South Africa, 27-28 November 2008.Diphthongs typically form an integral part of the phone sets used in English ASR systems. Because diphthongs can be represented using smaller units (that are already part of the vowel system) this representation may be inefficient. We evaluate the need for diphthongs in a Standard South African English (SSAE) ASR system by replacing them with selected variants and analysing the system results. We define a systematic process to identify and evaluate replacement options for diphthongs and find that removing all diphthongs completely does not have a significant detrimental effect on the performance of the ASR system, even though the size of the phone set is reduced significantly. These results provide linguistic insights into the pronunciation of diphthongs in SSAE and simplifies further analysis of the acoustic properties of an SSAE ASR system.enDiphthongsAcoustic analysisConference PresentationMartirosian, O., & Davel, M. (2008). Acoustic analysis of diphthongs in Standard South African English. http://hdl.handle.net/10204/3021Martirosian, O, and M Davel. "Acoustic analysis of diphthongs in Standard South African English." (2008): http://hdl.handle.net/10204/3021Martirosian O, Davel M, Acoustic analysis of diphthongs in Standard South African English; 2008. http://hdl.handle.net/10204/3021 .TY - Conference Presentation AU - Martirosian, O AU - Davel, M AB - Diphthongs typically form an integral part of the phone sets used in English ASR systems. Because diphthongs can be represented using smaller units (that are already part of the vowel system) this representation may be inefficient. We evaluate the need for diphthongs in a Standard South African English (SSAE) ASR system by replacing them with selected variants and analysing the system results. We define a systematic process to identify and evaluate replacement options for diphthongs and find that removing all diphthongs completely does not have a significant detrimental effect on the performance of the ASR system, even though the size of the phone set is reduced significantly. These results provide linguistic insights into the pronunciation of diphthongs in SSAE and simplifies further analysis of the acoustic properties of an SSAE ASR system. DA - 2008-11 DB - ResearchSpace DP - CSIR KW - Diphthongs KW - Acoustic analysis LK - https://researchspace.csir.co.za PY - 2008 SM - 9780799223507 T1 - Acoustic analysis of diphthongs in Standard South African English TI - Acoustic analysis of diphthongs in Standard South African English UR - http://hdl.handle.net/10204/3021 ER -